With the immense success of Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter both domestically and globally, Japanese developer Nihon Falcom has been actively working on more localizations of their titles, while also devising new long-term strategies for expanding their IPs in the West. In a recent interview with Presidents Dictionary, Toshihiro Kondo, CEO and President of Nihon Falcom, talked about the company’s philosophy and where it positions itself against its major global competitors in the industry, like China and Korea.
“Rather than competing in terms of scale, we want to compete globally by honing the creative spirit and originality that’s unique to Japan. Currently, the scale of game development has been enormously expanding on a worldwide level, and we’re now living in an age where having capital strength is considered important,” Kondo notes.
According to Kondo, leveraging Japan’s unique identity and creative spirit is what will help companies like Falcom stand out in the ever-expanding video game market, as Chinese and Korean studios continue to release high-quality titles developed on a large scale. “Chinese and Korean developers work on such a large scale and hold so much capital, we don’t stand a chance against them. However, I think we all agree that there is still something Japan-produced content has that they can’t compete with – its creative spirit and originality,” he says.
“While it’s important to be rational and create things together as a coherent organization, works infused with individual flair and the desire to ‘create something you like no matter what’ carry a truly unique charm. That’s why our company values personal preferences, or in other words, individuality.” Of course, as Kondo mentions, having a company-wide individualistic mindset means that clashing opinions and sensibilities easily turn into disagreements, and it’s also not that efficient if you look at the big picture. “But if we tried to avoid that and make everything systematic, our strongest virtues would disappear.”
Kondo considers the biggest strength of Nihon Falcom to be a “handcrafted feel” that comes from deliberately maintaining an “amateur” attitude towards game development. “Our founder often said, ‘We are a company of amateurs.’ This means that, in contrast to the fully sectionalized labor-division systems imposed by major corporations, we’re an organization in which all members exert their knowledge beyond their domains [of expertise], without clinging to just one specialized field,” he explains.
